"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Ask him how much time has passed and he will tell you that none has passed at all.
He will tell you neither ice nor death know time.
And, because he is a monster, he does not either.
How meaningless the changing of the seasons, the passing of days.
Born an ugly thing, it is hard to tell that he has aged at all now that he’s an adult.
Nothing about him changes these days, Bael. Except that now he can touch the surface of a pool and watch as the whole thing freezes. Sometimes he will wait for some poor, unwitting creature to wade into the depths before he administers his kiss just to watch it writhe and squirm. The darkness in him is ancient and depthless.
The darkness in him is hungry.
He watches now as the ice splinters outward away from him, watches as the vegetation wilts and freezes. It has always been in his nature to destroy, understand. The first thing he brought to ruin was his voice when his mother, horrified by the ugly thing she had birthed, froze him in place with her own ropes of ice. He had screamed for her, frantic and starving, and she had left him there. The ice had softened more and more the further she got from him, until he could shake free of it. But she was already gone, Camellia, lost to him.
So now it is gravel, strangely stilted by the unnaturally beaked mouth. And only the first of many things he has wrecked.
Because he knows all about hunger.
He roams now, something wicked unleashed on the world more than something birthed into it, though there are much wickeder things here.
And he comes upon the river in his roaming and is just about to press his mouth into the water when he hears something, though he cannot identify the sound or its source. So he just pauses there, hovering above the river’s writhing surface, and listens.
( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
From a shadowy copse of trees, she watches him, silent. Her eyes, large and dark, brim with a curiosity she can hardly contain, purposely keeping her breathing soft. She doesn’t know why she does this — why she watches instead of approaching, as if she is trying to steal a glimpse into the side they show when they think they are alone. Usually, she watches them from above, hidden within the wisps of cotton-candy clouds, crafting stories about them to weave into her daydreams. From up there, they were always exactly as she needed them to be.
She had decided earlier today that she would work up the courage to meet one of them. To see if maybe she has been missing something by confining her idea of them to her own mind and imagination.
There is no particular reason that she chose him, at least, not in the beginning. She listens to the soft rush of the river, wondering what he is thinking as he hovers above it. There is something dark, something strange that seems to cling to him, and perhaps this has been embedded into the very fabric of her making, but his darkness is what pulls her from hiding.
“Hello,” she says to him, her voice soft as the stardust that drifts in lazy motes from her wings as she walks. She does not know yet to be afraid; no one had ever been unkind in her made-up versions of the world, and even in the case of her own father her mother was an unreliable source. Still, she does not close the space between them entirely, her dark eyes watching him from beneath the honeyed glow of the halo above her head. “Did you do that?” She asks, gesturing toward the trail of frozen and wilted vegetation he seems to have left in his wake.
He lifts his head slow, blinking lazy, and turns to look at her. Not at all what he expects to come swimming out of the trees at him, all light and stardust, that halo casting soft light across her brow. Beautiful, certainly, but he has always found himself drawn most strongly to the ugly things. Beauty is too fragile, he thinks, don’t take much to sully it. Much harder to make ugly things anything other than exactly what they are.
He does not respond to her greeting, merely casts his gaze past her to the ruin she references. The answer seems obvious, as they’re the only ones around as far as he can tell. He blinks back at her, thinks that he could show her.
He nudges a strand of ice across the earth between them, watches as it begins to climb her forelimb before he nods it back down into the dirt. He does not stay here where she stands the way his mother had done to him. It is not kindness that prevents him from doing so but a sort of laziness. It would simply take too much effort. The tendril of ice snakes back to him then, disappearing completely at his feet. He rolls one shoulder in a sort of shrug then, says, “guess so.”
He offers no further answer, merely stands and watches her. He does not suspect she’ll flee from him, though the ice he wields is born from terror, there is nothing overtly frightening about it. It had not been meant to scare her anyway, it had merely been a demonstration.
“You do that?” he asks, nodding to the stardust accumulating around her feet.
( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
Silence stretches between them, her heartbeat echoing around it, and she thinks he is going to ignore her presence entirely. Perhaps being pretty has spoiled her, because that was not an option she had considered, and her chest goes tight at the thought of it.
In her dream-world they never ignored her; they didn’t need to be in love with her, of course, but they did not ignore her.
She does not know why the idea of it—of being disliked or unwanted—sparks a desperation in her veins that she has not felt before, and she thinks, in that moment, that she would do anything to rid herself of the feeling.
So it’s almost a relief to see the ice winding towards her, to at least be acknowledged.
There is a moment where her heart gives a sudden lurch as the ice touches her skin, winding up her leg before dropping back down, and she sucks in a soft, startled breath at the coldness of it. She looks at him, dark brown eyes alight with curiosity and admiration. “You must be powerful, to be able to create ice,” she tells him, transfixed by his ice-blue eyes, by the nearly tangible darkness that radiates from him—a stark contrast to the naivety that emanates from her. After spending most of her young life locked in a tower of her own making, she was beginning to realize just how little she understood the world she had been watching.
“Oh,” she says when he points out the stardust, looking down to where it has settled in a thin layer on the ground. The way that he says it—almost indifferent—makes her wonder if he is annoyed by it, and what will she do if he is? She cannot turn it off, and she worries now that everyone (a scant few though it may be) she has met has also been put off by the golden dust that spilled from the tips of her wings. “I did. I’m sorry,” she apologizes, but she isn’t sure why. She does not owe him anything, this ice-cold stranger, but that same desperation is there again, and that innate desire to twist herself into something that he would find tolerable.
“My name is Empyreal,” she says this as if giving him her name will somehow keep him here, like it is a thread to connect the two of them. She steps towards him, just once, her head tilted just slightly to meet his gaze when she asks him softly, hesitantly, as if she is already prepared for him to reject her in some way, “what’s yours?”
Something about her is strange.
Needy, he thinks, in a way that is unusual.
Bael is not a thing that others are meant to need anything from. Least of all validation. Her existence means precious little to him, if only because all existence to him seems trivial. Dark things do not much care for life or the rarified beauty of it all. He cannot make her meaningful.
He is young still, Bael, but he is not a fool. It feels like pandering, how mystified she seems by his power. There are things far more powerful than he, he knows that. He blinks at her, his brow hardening as he tilts his head in question. Yes, she is a strange thing indeed, he decides. Especially when she goes and apologizes for a thing she can’t control, like she’s not just after validation but reassurance, too. It seems an automatic thing, the apology. And he’s not a thing that puts all that much stock in talk, he finds that most words are meaningless, but it feels unnecessary.
“Okay,” he says. Okay, she’s done it. Okay, she’s sorry for it. It had not been an accusation, so much as it had been his way of pointing out that the answer to her question was almost painfully obvious. Yes, he had been so obviously responsible for the ruin left in his way, same as she had been so obviously responsible for the stardust that collected in soft mounds that seemed to dissolve slowly, the longer they stood there.
He’s ready to turn from her, to refocus his attention on the surface of the water. But she’s moving a little closer, telling her his name though he has not asked for it or, as far as he can tell, given her any indication that he’s interested in knowing it. He studies her a long, hard moment. What a remarkably soft thing she is, he thinks.
“There’s something a bit off about you, isn’t there?” he asks. It’s not meant to be rude, it is simply not in his nature to be tactful.
( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
There’s something a bit off about you, isn’t there?
If she is anything at all like the blood that created her, there is so very little that is right about her.
This is an innate thing that she knows, a wrongness that has been there as long as her heart has beat, but it is not something she could ever articulate or explain. She just knows that she was born with an insatiable ache in her chest that nothing seems to soothe, as if she had been born broken before the world had even touched her. She isn’t at all offended that he had picked up on this right away; she has always assumed anyone would be able to see it, that her honeyed halo and shimmering stardust could not hide her flaws. It is partially this belief that she does not belong that has kept her hidden all this time, and perhaps it is fate that her first act of bravery is only reaffirming her suspicions.
But instead of withdrawing inward she only gives a small smile, a quiet curiosity sparking in her dark eyes as she watches him. She finds him equally strange, though she does not say that. For all her dreaming, she could not have possibly dreamed up anyone quite like him—she has not experienced such a coldness before, and her naive mind simply would not have been able to conjure it.
“Isn’t there something a bit off about everyone?” She asks, genuine. She is sheltered, but she knows that part of being alive is being imperfect. But a slight frown shadows her brow, tentatively adding, “I can’t possibly be the strangest you have ever met.”
The strangest thing about her, he thinks, is that she hasn’t left. That she seems some kind of glutton for punishment, the way she lingers, goes on talking. Like maybe there’s some part of her that craves indifference. Or maybe there’s some part of her that thinks she’ll change it. Change it with her beauty, her softness, those pretty, pretty eyes.
He considers her question, can’t think of any counter-argument. “I guess,” he mutters and rolls a shoulder in a kind of shrug. What’s off about him? Nothing that he can think of, really. But they live in different worlds, that much is obvious, so he supposes there are probably several things that she could point to as being off about him. He is an ugly thing, she is a beautiful thing, the two are not meant to interact and perhaps that’s why she seems so strange.
“I’m not used to beautiful things,” he tells her. And he says it so plainly that it’s evident in his tone that it had not been meant as a compliment, merely an observation. Anyone who looked at her could tell she was beautiful, just as anyone who looked at him could tell he was ugly. “So, in that way, you are absolutely the strangest thing I’ve ever met.”
He glances at the water, wonders if he should just continue on with what he’d had planned despite her still standing there. Clearly he has no issue with being rude. But it takes a tremendous amount of concentration, still, to send his ice across the entire surface of the water. So, finally, he surrenders and turns from the river to face her fully.
“Bet you’re not used to ugly things,” he says, “so, in that way, bet I’m one of the stranger things you’ve met.”
( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She isn’t sure what she is supposed to feel when he calls her a beautiful thing.
She knows that she is, or at least, she knows that she should be perceived that way. But she thinks that she is beautiful in the way a flower is beautiful, or a sunset. Nature behaving in the way you would expect—a cosmic and ethereal thing birthed from a god and an angel, as if there could be any other outcome.
There is a small, logical part of her that knows he is only stating a fact.
So she may not flush with warmth, and yet still there is a brief, sudden flutter of her pulse as something else flairs to life inside of her. A shadowy thing that curls around that miniscule validation, clings to it, holds it tight. For a brief moment that hollow ache in her chest doesn’t feel so empty, and while she doesn’t yet recognize this for what it is—her fatal flaw, an inheritance of mother’s brokenness—she tries desperately to hang onto it.
“Well, I haven’t met very many others,” she says, thinking. Her circle was terribly small, and once again she was wondering how badly she had doomed herself sequestering away in dreams and clouds. But even from her vantage point above, she knew that he wasn’t the only strange creature to walk these lands. She has seen them—dragons, shadow creatures, things made of more bone than flesh. She wouldn’t lie and say she found them beautiful, but she did not think them ugly, either. They existed as part of the world the same way everything else did, woven into the same tapestry that painted a larger picture. “So I guess for now, you are the strangest, but that could change.” She says this with a smile, her dark eyes alight with her teasing. And now, with his attention directly on her, she presses again, “And, you still haven’t told me your name.”
